The food we eat contributes to our heath and well-being. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture has developed the food pyramid to help people choose foods that are healthy
and sufficient servings to lead a healthy lifestyle and make healthy choices every day. This unit
encourages students to consider the foods that they eat in relation to the food pyramid, to keep
track of how much fat they consume in a fat diary, and to compare their intake of fat with that of other
students around the country.

Objectives

Students will:

Learn about the food pyramid.

Learn about how much fat is in our regular diets.

Share data collected on fat intake with other students.

Learn to use math to calculate group averages and classroom totals.

Materials and Resources

In developing our lessons and activities, we made some
assumptions about the hardware
and software that would be available in the classroom for teachers who visit the
LETSNet Website. We assume that teachers using our Internet-based lessons or
activities have a computer
(PC or Macintosh) with the necessary hardware components (mouse, keyboard, and
monitor) as well as software (operating system, TCP/IP software, networking or
dial-up
software, e-mail and a World Wide Web client program, preferably Netscape, but
perhaps
Mosaic or Lynx). In the section below, we specify any "special"
hardware
or software
requirements for a lesson or activity (in addition to those described above)
and the level of Internet access required to do the activity.

Lesson Two: Counting Fat in Our Diet. Students take home
a fat diary and keep track of the fat in the foods they eat over a week. Parents can work with
students to calculate the amount of fat in their diet.

Lesson Three: Classroom Comparison of Fat Intake.
Students bring in their fat diaries and work in pairs to calculate their average fat intake
per day during the week that data is collected. Following this, the whole class gathers to
calculate their total fat intake and average fat intake per student per week and per day. Each
student can compare his/her average and total fat intake with those of other students in the class, and
this can lead to a discussion of eating habits and possible changes to food intake.

The Fat Counting unit contains activities that encourage and support student
learning about math and science, especially in the areas of food and health. In developing these
lessons, we have considered the science standards of the National
Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) math standards page maintained by the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education. One Computer vs. Many

The plans for this unit are tailored to fit teaching
situations where students
have access to several computers with an Internet connection. To accommodate
classrooms
that do not have access to a computer lab with full Internet connections,
students can
work in research groups to explore Internet sites and conduct their research.

If you have only one computer with Internet access, you
may
choose to do one of the following:

If you have the technology, you may hook up the computer to a TV
monitor or
LCD projector. This will allow the whole class to see sites in the preliminary
stages when students are exploring sites created by other children.

You may choose to have
students take turns working in groups using the computer with Internet access.

You may also download files from the Internet and save them on a
disk. Now you can transfer the
files you saved on a disk to the other non-Internet computers. Installing
copies of
your Web browser on all non-Internet computers will allow you to view the
pages you saved to a disk. This will not allow students to explore
hyper-links, but they will be able to access and view the information by
opening
each file with the Web browser.